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Recourse Technologies will release a new version of its ManHunt security tool in March, adding new security-event correlation and analysis features, intrusion-detection options and enhanced reporting to the product.

ManHunt is a system that offers intrusion detection (IDS), tools to prevent denial of service attacks and data collection and analysis, all at nearly gigabit speeds, according to Recourse. ManHunt 2.0, the new version of the product, will build on those features by adding beefed-up analysis and reporting tools, improved intrusion-detection features and a host of other improvements, according to Fred Kost, vice president of marketing and product development at Recourse.

The new version of ManHunt adds two features that will allow administrators to better analyze network traffic and security events, Kost said. First, the system can now collect data across a company's geographically dispersed ManHunt sensors, allowing administrators to get a global view of their network and to see larger patterns, he said. Secondly, ManHunt 2.0 adds data collection from third-party IDS products from vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc., Internet Security Systems Inc. and Enterasys Networks Inc., which will let administrators obtain and analyze more data about their networks, Kost said.

ManHunt 2.0 also allows users to create their own intrusion-detection signatures, either from scratch or inputting them from the open source IDS system Snort, by adding support for the Snort signature format, Kost said. Signatures identify attacks based on their behavior.

Recourse has also adding a number of smaller improvements to the way ManHunt handles alerts and reports, Kost said. ManHunt's management console can now be customized with sounds, colors and other actions set to be triggered when an alert is sent, he said. The system can also be set to record traffic flow during security events, he added.

The product also adds support for new kinds of graphs, analysis and reporting features, he said. Among those features is a deal with SecurityFocus Inc. that will see SecurityFocus provide deeper analysis on bug reports and security events within Recourse's console, Kost said.

The level of report detail provided in ManHunt 2.0 is one of the features that makes it a compelling product, according to Jeff Uslan, director of security at Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment Inc., who has used earlier versions of ManHunt and the new edition. Uslan, who uses the product to handle a network spread across 60 locations on multiple continents, is enthusiastic about ManHunt's data collection and analysis tools as well.

"(ManHunt) provides an enterprise administrator with a tremendous capability to determine whether they have an issue" with their network, he said.

Uslan also said that he hopes Recourse will enable ManHunt sensors to automatically update themselves with the latest signature information and that the company will make some interface enhancements that make the IDS features easier for nonexpert IDS users to understand.

Overall, though, ManHunt has served Uslan well, he said.

"It's pretty damn close to crystal-balling (predicting the future) as far as an intrusion into your network," he said.

ManHunt 2.0 runs on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris operating system on both Sun SPARC and Intel Corp. chips. The software will be available on March 1 at a starting price of US$25,000.

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